"Think like an advocate. Plan like a politician." These are words of advice given to preservice school librarians as they learn about managing and advocating for their school library budget in graduate-level school library management courses.

Think like an advocate means understanding your school library stakeholders and their interests in the school library program. Planning like a politician involves crafting and planning systematic communication that will best resonate with your stakeholders. Being "political" often gets a negative connotation. In the context of the school library program, it is exhibiting savviness about educating and advocating for the program and the students you serve, not a nefarious agenda. Advocating and aspiring to provide the best school library program spurs political engagement in our local communities.

Politically savviness begins with becoming informed as to who the decision and policy makers are, understanding their concerns, and learning where their attention is focused. School librarians must begin gathering information about how decisions are made, information is communicated, and what connections are already made between and among stakeholders. There is no need to reinvent the wheel; take advantage of connections and communication patterns that are already established.

Getting started with creating your advocacy message begins with thinking about your goals for the school library program, then connecting key points in service of those goals.

1. Identify a goal, your mission and vision.
2. Connect your goals to district goals (or connect to national/international standards, and/or position statements).
3. Connect your goal to the success of others.
4. Identify your institution's bottom line (test scores, student achievement, cost, service).
5. Recognize your "power" (what are the successes in your school library program).
6. Brainstorm data/information that will support your message.
7. Develop an action plan to gather and share the message.

Woven throughout these steps are three C's that guide savvy school librarians: collaboration, commitment, and communication.

Collaboration

Cooperating and working with others is key to establishing collaborative partnerships and ensuring that your stakeholders understand the vision and mission of the school library and share in its success. Benefits of collaboration with parents, volunteers, teachers, administrators include developing a shared understanding and creating a community that is working towards a similar goal.

Commitment

Commit to action and make a plan that can be implemented and is comprehensive in scope to ensure no stakeholder group is left out of the communication loop. Develop routine procedures and best practices for documenting your successes in the school library.

Communication

Gathering information from school library activities to share in your crafted communication messages is often an overlooked task. The best motto is to document! Gather data and feedback on every aspect of your school library program. Are you collaborating with teachers? Document lessons taught, gather feedback from your faculty colleagues and students. Ensure you have good anecdotal data to illuminate statistics and survey data. Get student quotes, pictures, or work samples to illuminate the collaborative successes. Have you provided any professional development to teachers, like "lunch and learn" opportunities, virtual resources, or online tutorials? Gather feedback or web analytics to share the successes of collaborative instruction. Have you promoted the love of reading through reader's advisory, displays, or programming? Gather anecdotal evidence through student reviews and feedback. Support the "warm fuzzy" qualitative responses with statistics maximizing the use of the library's integrated library system with circulation reports, collection analysis data, and national spending averages for collection development.

Being political is making connections, forming partnerships and fostering relationships, and sharing the great work that you do in the school library and, most importantly, educating your supporters and stakeholders on the value of the school library program. Political literacy is vital to ensuring stakeholders are aware of and can articulate the value of the school library program should the need arise.

School librarians can access a national advocacy toolkit developed by the American Association of School Librarians (http://www.ala.org/aasl/advocacy/) and the internationally focused advocacy toolkit developed by the International Federation of Libraries (https://www.ifla.org/publications/school-library-advocacy-kit). These kits comprised of brochures, discussion guides, and infographics advocate the importance of school librarians and access to the school library. Specific informational documents are targeted to stakeholder groups such as parents or administrators.

The goal of being politically literate and engaged is to create positive change for the school library program. School librarians have opportunities to engage at all levels to bring about change internationally, nationally, regionally or right in their own communities.